The BCG vaccine (Bacillus Calmette and Guérin vaccine), unique and oldest vaccine globally used for the control of tuberculosis, has its history full of controversies and doubts about its efficacy or effectiveness. Used for the first time in 1921, as a great hope to control a disease that decimated populations and for which there was no control, it had its reputation damaged with the incident of Lübeck in 1930, in Germany, where a large proportion of children died after being given the BCG vaccine. It was later found that it was used for the preparation of the vaccine, not the attenuated bacillus of Calmette and Guérin, but a virulent strain of the bacillus of Köch. The author intends, in this article, to do brief discussion on the BCG vaccine and the controversies about its efficacy and/or effectiveness, described in several studies with different designs carried out in Brazil and in the world, without the intention to cover all that has been published on this subject, and to comment on the new vaccines that are being evaluated still in an experimental phase